


Signals and Waves

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Shisei no Koe | Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Game(s), Psychic Abilities, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:54:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months after the events of FF3, Rei takes a trip and learns different ways to listen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signals and Waves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FireEye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/gifts).



There wasn’t much left in Yuu’s room now. Over the past two months it had grown more bare, little by little, so that it surprised Rei to walk in and find it so empty, even though she’d filled and removed all the boxes herself. It had been easier to let go a little at a time, and easier to do it herself, even if it meant that most of the boxes ended up in the attic rather than out of the house.

Now all that was left were Yuu’s old machines and notebooks, and his address-book, which she’d been using to contact his work colleagues and more distant friends. Rei still wasn’t sure what to do about the room. It seemed too big to waste on storage or leave empty as a guest-room; perhaps Miku would like it for her craft and sewing, or perhaps they could set it up as a larger dark-room. Rei thought she would prefer to fill it soon. She didn’t like it empty: the way sound bounced off the bare walls, the way voices from outside seemed to come out of the corners or the half-open closet door. She found she was a lot more jumpy these days.

The phone rang downstairs. Rei stood still a moment, half-hoping for an excuse to leave the last few items for another few days, but after the third ring Miku answered. She always managed to be there whenever Rei was putting something off. It was uncanny.

At least, Rei noticed as she got to work, Miku had made the job as easy as possible. She had already looked into the history of the devices, and set out labelled boxes for them; all that was left for Rei to do was match each piece with its box, and try to guess, as she consigned them to darkness, what they might have been for. One or two of them resembled the crystal radio, but she had to admit that she had no idea at all about the others. As she took each of the machines from the shelf, she tried to remember what Yuu had told her about them, but whatever it had been, she hadn’t retained a word.

She’d been at it for no more than ten minutes, and was making good progress, when Miku came upstairs. “That was the editor on the phone just now. He had a possible job for you, but I told him you were going away this week. You are still, aren’t you?”

Rei raised her eyebrows. “It's my mother’s birthday. The date is sort of fixed.”

“Yes, well, I noticed you hadn’t started packing yet.”

“I can pack this evening. There’s not much, anyway, I’m only staying two nights.”

“I could make a list for you, if you like. That always helps me.”

“I’ll be fine, but thanks for the offer,” Rei said, smiling. “I just want to get these last few things boxed up before I go, so I won’t have to think about it while I’m there.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” Miku stepped into the room, hands clasped primly before her as she leaned forward to peer into the boxes. “Do you need any help with this?”

“Mm, no, I think I’m all right. The labels you wrote are very handy.”

“I thought you might be interested, so I left out Yuu’s notes about his collection. Did you read them?”

“Not yet.”

“They’re quite interesting. You know, not all of these machines were actually made by Dr. Asou. Some of them were invented by his students, or people studying his principles. I guess Yuu must have been interested in the whole topic.”

“Oh,” said Rei, tucking wads of soft tissue paper into the tricky corners around one of the irregularly-shaped devices. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“They’re here, okay?” Miku waited until Rei looked up at her, then tapped the notebooks stacked on the desk. “I marked the important pages for you. I think you should take a look.”

“Okay,” Rei said, and smiled at the little frown creasing Miku’s forehead. “I’ll look as soon as I’ve finished packing these up.”

The days were short, and it was getting dark by the time she taped the last box and went over to the desk. Miku was as good as her word, and the different-coloured markers were labelled as neatly as the boxes had been. Rei opened one of the notebooks, turning the pages slowly towards the first marker. There were lots of diagrams and clippings photocopied from books that showed other devices, some nothing like the ones Yuu had. There were so many inventions, so many people searching for a way to see the spirit world, always looking for that cold hand, that ghost hand, to come reaching up out of the water. But why look, if you didn’t have to?

Rei flipped the notebook shut without even reaching the page that Miku had pointed out to her, and pushed it towards the back of the desk. It was a waste of time. She had packing to do, and all this would still be here when she got back, if she wanted it then. The light was dying in Yuu’s room, and she closed the door behind her.

***

By the time she set out, late the next morning, she’d all but forgotten the devices and the notes about them. She was looking forward to seeing her parents again, and more than that, it was good to be out on the road again by herself. Driving was, against all odds, one of the few things she had never lost her taste for after Yuu had died, and when she was behind the wheel she found she hardly thought about the crash at all. She had a feeling – foolish, probably, but strong – that the worst was behind her, as if such a thing could only happen once in a lifetime, and the road held no more danger for her.

She opened the window a little, letting the brisk chill whip colour into her cheeks, and when the radio played a series of sentimental love-songs, she felt no compulsion to turn it off as she would have done at home, where Yuu’s absence still intervened in every train of thought. She even tapped her finger on the wheel in time to the more catchy ones.

It took slightly less than an hour to reach the Amakura house, on the outskirts of the city, and Rei sat in the car for a minute with her engine off, building a visual impression of the place. It was an old habit: she had trained herself to think about what details she might highlight if she were assigned to such-and-such a place for a job, and now she did it for every potentially important location. It helped when she had to find a certain house or street again.

There was not much to focus on here. It looked like an ordinary family home, just like the others on either side of it. As she walked up to the front door, though, she noticed one thing that wasn’t evident from the road. There was a pinwheel in a flower-pot by the door, scarlet and unexpected as a voice out of the shadow. It seemed a morbid thing to have in a garden, but it struck her, and for the first time she could remember she found herself wanting to photograph something purely for the joy of capturing it. She stood for several moments before she rang the doorbell, watching the pinwheel turn in the breeze, but Kei must have been waiting for her, because he answered almost at once.

“I expected something different,” she admitted as she took off her shoes in the neat, bland entrance.

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Just different.”

He followed her gaze to a woven hanging in pastel colours on the far wall, and the fancy mirror beside it with a bright beaded frame. When he turned back, his smile was wry. “Don’t get the wrong idea. This is my sister’s house. While she’s in hospital it’s easier for me to stay here than for Mio to move in with me. My apartment...” He made a squishing gesture between the flattened palms of his hands. “I trip over myself in there.”

That was better. A tiny apartment suited Kei much better than this, in Rei’s mind. She tried to imagine him manoeuvring his wide shoulders around a narrow galley-kitchen, like the one she’d shared with three other girls at university, and suppressed a smile.

“I guess you want to see the book first,” Kei said over his shoulder, leading the way through the living-room, “so don’t think I’m a bad host if I just take you straight to the study. It’s almost finished. I just need to chase down a few more references, and then...” He shrugged. “I haven’t started talking to any publishers yet. I’m not sure who’s likely to look at it.”

Rei didn’t mind if the book never got published, and she didn’t think Kei did either, except insofar as he didn’t want to have wasted two months on something that would never earn him any royalties. She thought that writing was the only way he knew to approach the experiences he’d had; like Miku’s housework and crafting, it was his way of making the world orderly. Once Rei had used photography that way, and she thought in time she might learn how to do it again.

Kei’s study – or rather, the room he’d appropriated as his study – was the room she’d photograph if she had to illustrate an article about him. It was clearly a temporary setup, with order struggling in patches out of the chaos. The ornaments which must once have inhabited the shelves were piled unceremoniously in a cardboard box by the door, and the shelves had been crammed with books and tattered copies of academic journals. There were pens in an ancient-looking tea-kettle on the desk, a typewriter enthroned on a stack of blank paper, and a pinboard propped against one wall, displaying some photographs that Rei recognised and a few she didn’t. Kei reached into the narrow space between the desk and the wall and finally unearthed his briefcase from under a pile of books.

“Where’s Mio?” Rei asked, becoming conscious of the silence in the house as Kei drew out the manuscript and flicked through to make sure the pages were all in order.

“At school.”

“Really? That’s wonderful! She must be doing better.”

“Much better. She went back last week, and it’s doing her good to be with her old friends again. I think she was lonely, but now she's starting to settle down, she's almost the way she used to be, sometimes.” He became more animated, talking about Mio. “I’ll tell her you were here. She’ll be sorry she missed you.”

“I think she’ll be more sorry she didn’t get the chance to talk with me about how cute and cool Miku is. Don’t worry, I know I’m not the idol. My feelings are only a little bit bruised.” 

“She thinks you’re both equally cute and cool,” Kei said, then looked as if he wished he hadn’t. “But actually, you’ve reminded me.” He put the manuscript down on top of the typewriter and ducked down to one of the desk drawers, pulling it almost all the way out and feeling around in the deep rear corner. “I think I should give you this back.”

Rei drew her hands in to her body, not quite recoiling, her good mood swooping away from her. Kei was holding out the camera, the one from Yuu’s room, the older, tarnished twin of the one she’d once found in a dream.

“Give it back?” She tried to keep her voice light, but instead it wavered, thin and frail. “It’s not mine. You’re the one who found it.”

“I was never going to keep it,” Kei said. “I was going to give it to Yuu. I knew it was the sort of thing he liked, and it’s part of his family history.”

“But...” _Yuu’s dead._ It stayed unspoken, but Kei winced all the same.

“It – you’re the one who – it worked for you. They were your dreams. Even when they were ours.”

Rei took a step back, wanting to deny it, deny everything, but before she could he spoke again, sounding frustrated with himself.

“I don’t mean to burden you. The truth is, I’m nervous about keeping it around. Not that I think it has any power left, I just don’t want Mio to find it. She’s doing so well, and I... I don’t want to risk setting her back even a little.”

Rei still hesitated, her hands held up under her throat as if the camera might try and leap into them. She didn’t want it. She could live with the memories, she knew that now, but that didn’t mean she wanted another reminder squatting on her desk like an evil omen.

“I asked around, but nobody wants to buy it in this condition,” Kei said, holding it out to her. It looked small and inconsequential in his hands, the leather bellows furled like the pages of some black book. “If you don’t take it I’ll throw it away, but that doesn’t seem right to me.”

It didn’t seem right to Rei, either. Reluctantly, she held out her hands, and Kei tipped the camera into them. She could feel where he’d held it, where the leather and metal had grown warm.

“Thank you,” he said.

Meeting his eyes, when he was looking at her with such gratitude and sincerity, seemed hard, so she looked down at the camera instead. It wasn’t so bad now she was holding it. Kei was right: whatever power it had once had was gone. Perhaps all the dark memories were like that, when you brought them out into the light.

“I feel stupid,” she said, without entirely meaning to.

“What? Why?” He sounded honestly bewildered, and she liked that.

“I knew Yuu so well. I lived with him and Miku and his books and his weird machines for years, but I never thought about it. I never asked about his work. He would try and tell me something and I just...” She made a motion with her hand, like something fluttering away, while the other held the Camera Obscura against her chest.

“If that makes you stupid, we’re both stupid.” Kei leaned back against the corner of his desk, rubbing his forehead. “Yuu and Mafuyu used to sit off by themselves for hours, talking about folklore, or looking at this family heirloom of Mafuyu’s. This old camera he had.” He rolled his eyes. “I told myself, _not my field_. I was busy enough with my own department, and I didn’t have time to get interested in theirs, even as a side project.”

“Is that all it was?”

He returned her stare blankly, and when he looked like that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she’d been scared. Scared of Yuu’s books, scared of his machines and her dreams and the path by the water, scared of what she almost overheard whenever Yuu and Miku were talking.

“Nothing,” she said, to Kei’s questioning expression. “Don’t worry.”

“Would you like to have a look at the book?” he asked her, after a brief silence. “I’d like your opinion.”

“Of course. That’s why I came.”

For the next hour she skimmed the pages he’d been working on since the last time she’d seen him, when she’d sent him off with three boxes of Yuu’s books and notes, a thin binder containing all the photographs she’d retrieved from the Camera Obscura, and of course, the camera itself. Once or twice she caught herself trying to discern Yuu’s style in the text, but if any of his words remained intact, she couldn’t tell them apart from Kei’s.

Overall, she was simply impressed. Kei had managed to create something coherent out of the fragments she’d handed him. She wondered if that meant he could hear Yuu’s voice more clearly than she could, and then cut that thought off, annoyed with herself. She had never been interested in Yuu’s work, never made any serious attempt to accompany him along that path. How could she begrudge his colleague that much, let alone one who had also been his friend?

It was afternoon by the time she left, promising to call in again on her way back. If the roads were clear, she thought she could still make good time to her parents’ house. She wrapped the Camera Obscura up in a cleanish rag and threw it into the back of the car, hoping she’d be able to forget it was there.

As the songs on the radio shifted from plaintive to upbeat and back again, the suburbs gave way to scattered clusters of houses, and the stretches of countryside between them grew longer. When the road began to climb into green foothills, Rei was reminded irresistibly of the journey to the Kuze Shrine; she even weighed the idea of taking a detour and leaving the camera in the ruins, but her parents were expecting her, and she would only make everyone worry with such a sudden change of plans.

The road unrolled before her, and as the landscape grew steadily more familiar, she felt herself regaining her equilibrium. What could be more normal than a woman travelling to celebrate her mother’s sixtieth birthday? The camera on the back seat was nothing but a broken antique, and in the house she had grown up in, she felt she might be safe from her memories’ power to hurt. She rolled the window almost all the way down, breathing the cold clean air, and wondered what she’d been holding back from.

There was no sign to announce that she had entered the town, only a long easy curve in the road, and then the bridge over the river that would take her into the town proper. As she crossed the river the radio station dissolved into static – she’d forgotten how it did that – and out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the path that ran alongside the water for three miles. It was bordered on one side, she knew, by a steeply-sloping grass verge, and on the other by metal safety-railings to stop people falling into the water. She remembered when the railings had been put up. She had only been a little girl then. It had been spring, and the water had been greenish-brown as it came galloping down from the high mountains, but now it was winter and the river would be grey and dormant under a lacy skin of ice.

_I don’t have to go down there,_ she thought, and didn’t know why she had thought it. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that here were none of the associations that kept ambushing her in her everyday life. She could escape for a while, around familiar corners. It wasn’t rest and relaxation she needed, like Miku thought, and it wasn’t work, as she had believed: it was home.

It was a good thing that she hadn’t settled on peace and quiet as the essential elements of this trip, because from the moment she drew in outside her parents’ house, there was little of either to be found. Her mother was out in the small front garden, doing something that involved handfuls of long, straight sticks; Rei couldn’t tell whether the sticks were to be put into the earth or pulled out, but either way her mother was busy about it. Her face was blooming with exertion, and when she saw Rei, her face lit up in a smile, notwithstanding that she tried to conceal her dirty gardening clothes behind her armful of sticks.

“You’re here!” she cried, taking two big steps out of the flowerbed to meet Rei at the gate. “Go inside and tell them to let me in. All I did was poke my head around the kitchen door, just to make sure they didn’t need help, and for that they banished me. They wouldn’t even let me put my nice clothes on before you arrived.”

“Who wouldn’t let you?”

Her mother waved a dismissive hand, deftly tucking the sticks into the crook of her elbow. “All those demon grannies in there. Witches. Don’t let them tell you I should be grateful for all their hard work.” She cast a grim look towards the house. “They locked the door on me.”

Rei thought she was beginning to understand, and relaxed into a smile. “Let’s go in together, then. It’s cold, and I’d like to wash my face. They won’t lock both of us out.”

“They’ll try,” her mother said darkly, but put her sticks aside and stripped her off gardening gloves willingly enough.

The house, as Rei had suspected, was full of aunts. She didn’t think many of them were actually related to her – most were just family friends – but if asked to list which aunts fell into which category, she would have hesitated. It didn’t surprise her that they would exile the guest of honour to prevent her meddling with the preparations.

“Bad daughter,” one of the aunts called merrily in passing, catching sight of Rei standing in the entrance with her luggage. “You’re late. Are you going to help us get things ready or not?”

“She’s going to keep me company, since none of you will,” Rei’s mother retorted. “Come on, dear, let’s get you settled in.”

Rei’s old room wasn’t a bedroom any more; her mother had taken it over as a reading-room. The old wardrobe was still there, but not there were a chair and table by the window in place of a bed, and a long, low bookshelf along the wall where Rei’s desk had been. There was a freshly-aired futon folded up in the bottom of the closet. Rei had no time to unpack, so she put her suitcase in the corner and paused only to take a look out of the window before she went down to join the others. During her childhood, she’d been able to see the river from here, and the bridge into town, but in the intervening years the trees had grown up and screened it from view. She was obscurely glad of that.

It was easy to get swept along in the flow of activity, and Rei was glad to do it. That night they ate crammed into the tiny front room, and whenever Rei’s mother got up to do anything, no matter how innocent, one of the aunts went with her to ensure she wouldn’t peep at the party arrangements.

It was only at the end of the evening, when Rei was setting out her party dress for the next day, that her mother slipped into the room and put her hand in the crook of Rei’s elbow, squeezing warmly. “I’m relieved to see you looking so much better,” she said, speaking softly even as a crow-clatter of laughter burbled up from the aunts unrolling their futons downstairs. “We were all worried about you, you know.”

Rei couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but her mother didn’t seem to need a response. She just squeezed Rei’s arm again, with her hands that were only just beginning to knot at the knuckles, and left, pulling the door to behind her. Rei stood battling a complicated swell of guilt and shame; she hadn’t realised that her family had been worried about her too. She hadn’t known they had noticed anything different.

_You only see what you’re looking at,_ her mother had said to her when she was younger, always tripping over things and never hearing what people said unless they were standing right in front of her. She hadn’t understood at the time, and had never thought about it since, but all at once she was remembering what she’d said to Kei, and she thought she knew exactly what her mother had meant by it.

There was more to it than tripping over obvious obstacles and not noticing that her family was worried about her. She could think of so many times she’d walked through the living room when Yuu and Miku had been in there together, sometimes with books or maps or photographs on the table before them, sometimes bent over their knees and their empty hands, talking earnestly and intently. Back then she’d had the feeling that there was some secret they were in on and she wasn’t, but part of her must have liked it that way, because she’d never so much as eavesdropped long enough to tell what the two of them were talking about. Even in university, she had ignored everything about Yuu’s work, dropping her interest in folklore as soon as it began to make her feel uncomfortable. And before that, when she’d walked past the river with her eyes fixed straight ahead of her, not listening, not thinking, not seeing at anything but the narrow strip of pavement she was looking at.

_Why look, if you don’t have to?_

Rei rubbed her arms. She was cold all over, cold and prickly with goosebumps, and she didn’t know why. Even half an hour later, tucked in between the blankets and curled up like a cat, she was only beginning to get warm again.

***

In the dead of night, she woke. There was a sound in her room, a sound like the rush of water, and when she opened her eyes, she saw the old radio, Asou’s receiver, in the middle of her desk. It was emitting static from the speakers in a low, uninterrupted hiss. Rei sat up slowly, sliding her legs over the side of her bed and letting her feet touch the floor slowly and soundlessly.

“This is a dream,” she said.

“How do you know?” The voice was low, nearly a whisper, yet she knew it didn’t come from nearby. It hadn’t come out of the radio, either.

“This room is different,” she said. “There’s no bed here. That” – she pointed at the desk – “isn’t there any more. It’s a bookcase now. And the radio... I don’t have it with me. It’s in a box in Yuu’s room.”

“Come outside.” She knew that voice. In a minute she’d know who it was.

“I can’t. It’s too cold.”

“You’re dreaming. The cold won’t hurt you.”

Rei bowed her head, and then got up. She picked up the radio as she left the room, knowing there was no chance of it waking the others, no chance of her dream disturbing theirs.

The house was dark, but there was no mistaking that it was occupied by many people. From the slightly-open door of her parents’ room, she could hear faint old-fashioned music, and the sound of traffic and laughter and something like a bell ringing. If she went inside, she would walk into their dreams, but it seemed like an invasion, and besides, there was someone waiting for her outside. She slipped down the stairs silently, and down the hall, shying away from all the inhabited rooms and their soft tapestry of voices.

This had happened only three times since she’d escaped the Manor of Sleep, and each time upon waking she’d been able to convince herself it was nothing more than a dream. She thought this time it would be harder; she was beginning to want to know the truth.

If the air was cold outside, she didn’t feel it, just as the voice had said. In the moonlight, the town was like a scene painted on dusty blue silk in shades of grey. The only spot of brightness was the red bib of a Jizo statue at the end of the street. Had it always been there? Was it something new, or something she was only dreaming? When she walked past it, the radio sighed and crackled.

“Where are you?” she said into the quiet, but there was no answer, except perhaps the one inside her head. _You already know._ And of course, she did.

Frost glittered in the cracks of the road as she walked, but still she felt no chill. She followed the road where it led, down to where the static whisper of the radio blended seamlessly with the flow of the river. She stopped at the edge of the grassy bank and looked down across the water.

Now she could see who had been calling to her. The woman stood on the opposite shore, a twist of blue light like marsh-fire. Rei supposed she ought to feel fear, but instead she felt... irritated? Could that be right? She thought it was: it felt like working hard on an assignment, only to get home and discover the client had cancelled the job. The thought of all that wasted effort offended her, professionally and personally.

“I thought you had crossed over.” She fell just shy of making it an accusation.

“It’s only a dream,” Reika said.

“Does that mean none of this is real?”

She expected some cryptic reply, but Reika only watched her from the other bank. The eerie phosphorescence surrounding her was fading fast, and now she was little more than a blue haze scratched on the dimmer blue of the night.

“Why am I here?” Rei asked, trying a more direct approach. Reika said nothing, and with the mist rising from the river, she was so indistinct that she might not have been there at all. Rei started to walk closer, then stopped. There was the steep slope, the grass crisp with frost, and the riverside path that went into darkness under the bridge. She’d been so busy staring at Reika, and that was what she hadn’t seen: how close she would be to that dark space. With no street-lights, it was nearly a tunnel.

“I don’t have to go down there,” she whispered. “Why would I go if I don’t have to?” In her arms the radio made a sound so human she nearly threw it from her. She had stopped looking for Reika now. She was trying to peer into that darkness, make her eyes discern what was waiting there by the path just where the light grew too faint to see by. “What is it?” she said, and the sound of her voice startled her. Her eyes weren’t open after all, and her hands were empty, and she wasn’t standing but lying down...

This time her waking was real, and she sat up in the gloom of her old bedroom, disoriented. The window’s rectangle of dawn light swam somewhere much too high above her, and the furniture seemed to tower for a moment, before she remembered she was sleeping on the floor. She’d been talking in her sleep and her own voice had woken her.

She crawled over to the side table, bumping her shoulders and elbows on other furniture to get there, and switched on her mother’s reading-lamp. The electric light brought her back from the dream like a door closing on a murmured conversation, cutting it off in the middle. No radio, no Reika, no ghost under the bridge.

_That’s not true,_ the voice said in her mind, and now she couldn’t tell if it was Reika’s voice or hers. _And you know it._

There had been a voice out of the darkness, a hand out of the water – but her mind still shied from the memory. She wouldn’t sleep again, she knew, so she dressed quietly and slipped down the stairs, meaning to get herself a cup of coffee and perhaps sit in the frosty garden, listening as the birds sang in the dawn. When she opened the kitchen door to find her mother already awake, she was startled, but glad to have someone to talk to, a real voice to drown out the dream-voices echoing in her mind.

“I know,” her mother said, before Rei could speak. “I know, but I had to look. I don’t like surprises.”

Rei smiled. “Good morning,” she said, and her mother returned the smile guiltily.

“Yes, good morning.”

It was fun to be up so early, when the rest of the house was still asleep, as if they were sharing a secret. They stood in silence a while, sipping coffee, and then Rei’s mother spoke,

“You will be taking the pictures today, won’t you?”

Rei lifted her head, startled. “I – I haven’t – ” She wanted to say she hadn’t been taking pictures of people since the accident, but how could she say that to her own mother? “I haven’t brought a camera with me.”

“Oh, we can make do. We still have the one we got you when you went to college. I know, it’s probably not up to your usual standard, but it’ll do for family photos. You always took such lovely pictures when you were young. Now we only get to see them in magazines.”

Rei swallowed. _I’m not ready,_ she wanted to say, but another part of her was tired of that, tired of hiding from things that were never so bad as when you couldn’t bring yourself to look at them.

“All right. I’ll do my best.” Then, driven by the same reckless impulse, she went on, “I thought I’d take a walk around the town this morning, before everyone arrives. I’d like to have a walk by the river, if that path’s still open to the public.”

Her mother looked at her sideways. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“It’s the only road near here that I don’t have any photos of,” she said, which was true enough.

“But don’t you remember? You never walked that way if you could help it, after that little girl died. She was about your age, so I thought you were scared because of what happened to her.”

“Oh,” Rei said weakly, holding her cup as something shrank away inside her. “I... forgot.”

There had been a voice out of the darkness, a hand out of the water. For half a second she experienced again that texture of fear, that falling back of everything solid and safe. She remembered how she had run afterwards, and kept running long after the sound of the river had faded from her hearing, because the roaring in her ears had sounded so much the same.

“Do you still want to go on that walk?” her mother asked, peering at her. “I could come with you.”

“I – I don’t know,” Rei said, then shook her head. “No, let’s get out my old camera and make sure it still works.”

It did, and Rei distracted herself for the rest of the morning examining the party room, to make sure she’d catch her mother in the right light, and at the right angle. By then the aunts were awake and bustling about, with a quantity of uncles, cousins and family friends arriving in groups of two and three throughout the morning. Rei was not at all sure they’d be able to fit everyone in, and began to wonder why they hadn’t just booked a room in a restaurant instead of hosting it her parents’ small house, but soon she was forced to admit that she had underestimated the organisational prowess of the aunts. Everybody had somewhere to sit, and everyone found a free flat surface on which to leave their gifts and a vase in which to arrange their bouquets of red roses.

Rei was so busy trying to photograph the celebration, in between catching up with relatives she hadn’t seen since Yuu’s funeral, that she hardly had time to sit and eat, but even so, the memory of her dream and the river kept nudging through the festive atmosphere like streamers of cold fog. It came back particularly when she looked through the lens of the camera. To photograph people really well, rather than just with technical proficiency, she preferred a less crowded, boisterous environment. It felt intimate, to capture someone in an image that might well outlive them; she liked to feel she knew the person, even if only for the split second as the shutter came down. But here, with all the noise and activity, it was hard to listen for the quiet voice of connection, and she found herself turning her ear to the other whispers that were still stirring just under the surface of her consciousness. By the end of the afternoon, when the guests began to leave as they had come, a few at a time, she was exhausted, mentally and emotionally. It was all she could do to dry the plates that someone else was passing to her.

“I don’t know about the pictures,” she told her mother quietly, wearily, when they happened to step outside for some fresh air at the same time. “I don’t think they’ll come out well. I’m too out of practice, and I was distracted.”

“Don’t be modest,” her mother said complacently, fanning herself with her red hat. “They’ll be beautiful. They always are.”

She went back inside, but Rei stood in the doorway, looking down the street. The frost glittered in the cracks of the road as cars went by, and when they were gone the night was so still she could hear the river, even from here. A quarter-moon was rising. Behind her in the house, voices chattered, indistinct and nameless. It was so much like her dream of the previous night that she thought it had to mean something, and before she could talk herself out of it ( _why go if you don’t have to?_ ) she started walking, down the street, towards the murmuring water. It was cold, and she hadn’t even a jacket on, but she didn’t shiver; the cold lay upon her like a shroud and made her still inside.

This time she didn’t stop at the grass, but went down it, almost slipping where the earth was laced with frozen mud. Her dream had been wrong: there were lights under the bridge, casting a white light down over the concrete, more bare than the moon.

She had brought her friends back here, she remembered. She’d told them about the ghost, and they’d come ready to be frightened, ready to see something unnatural. One girl had sworn she knew how to summon spirits, because her mother was a medium, and she stood chanting something that sounded like a sutra while the others clung to each other, giggled and shrieked and looked down towards the water with nervous, eager eyes.

Rei had screamed when the hand came out of the water, and the others had screamed as well. “Oh, Rei,” one of them had moaned, hand over her heart, “you scared me to _death_. Why would you do that?”

And she had realised something worse: none of them saw it. The cold hand stretched towards the shore, trying to get to the warm earth, the warm bodies, and only Rei saw it.

After that she had never walked under the bridge again, and when she had to pass it, she kept her eyes fixed on the six inches of pavement before her feet, afraid to see something that wasn’t there. Why look, if looking meant she would see something nobody else could? And she had carried that thought with her into her into her adult life, focusing her attention on the things that everyone could see. Whenever a voice seemed to call to her from that other way, from the shadows that gathered under the bridge, in her mind, she fixed her eyes on the bright path and taught herself not to see, not to hear, not to know.

Now she stepped into the naked white light and knelt on the cold ground. The safety railing that they had put up to make sure no other children would drown was beginning to rust in places, but it was still strong. Rei put out her hand to the metal and waited.

Nothing happened.

The grey water kept streaming past under the frail glaze of ice. The light did not flicker or go out, and no voice spoke, and no hand broke the surface to clutch at her arm. There was nothing but the memory of the way the radio had crackled whenever she drove over the bridge, and the certainty in her mind that there _should_ be something here, there _had_ been something here. Perhaps, like a diminishing echo, it was too weak to be perceived any more. Or perhaps she had shut her mind so thoroughly she was no longer capable of hearing it.

Part of her wanted to believe that. She wanted to end this on the anticlimax and forget it for good. The same part of her wanted to throw away the Camera Obscura and sell Yuu’s contraptions, those reminders that there was something out there to see, for those properly equipped. She had never listened when Yuu had talked about that, not while he was alive; why should she start now?

Because after he was dead the truth had come looking for her anyway, like the echo of his voice, bringing others with it. To let it go now would be to go back to her old ways, to shut the door on that room of her memory and pretend nothing had happened. It would be betraying Yuu, to try and forget the other side of reality in which he’d taken her pain and carried it into the afterlife; it would be betraying Miku and Kei, who would no longer have her to share the truth with; and it would be betraying herself, to pretend that part of her simply was not there at all.

Rei made her way back to the house, beginning to shiver as the first cold stars appeared in the sky.

A week ago she would have spent a long time lying awake, even though she was tired. She would have hesitated, lingered in fear, told herself after this there was no going back, but that line had been crossed. She was learning to live with grief, and she would learn to live with truth, as well. She would even have friends to help her learn, but this part she had to do alone.

Her mind grew quiet as the house did around her. She supposed she slept; her dreams were rags of canvas, glimmers of colour, and she was never aware of losing touch with the real world, but when she opened her eyes, the room had changed. She was lying on her childhood bed, and the crystal receiver was mounted on the desk, waiting for her.

There was no voice this time to guide her to the river, but she didn’t need one. She passed between the dreams of her parents and her aunts, and went on into the wider dream landscape: the town’s dreams, the world’s dreams, or just her own. When she’d last looked in the waking world, the night had been clear, starlit and brittle with cold, but in her dream the snow was just starting to fall. Rei stepped into the shadow under the bridge. A low murmur was coming from the radio. Kneeling, Rei leaned out over the river.

There was a hand, just as there had been all those years ago. It was such a little, water-cold thing that Rei could feel no fear at all when it closed around her wrist. Even in her dream, it was so weak it didn’t even break the cobweb-threads of ice forming on the water’s edge, only wavered through them, sending them in and out of focus.

The Camera Obscura would be a bludgeon against something like this. She thought it had no memory of its body any more, drifting out of sight under the surface of the water, but in this dream kingdom, it had a voice. The radio muttered and hissed, and the voice spoke through the static, a scant, frightened whisper. With its hand around her wrist, it spoke, and Rei listened. Behind the veil of falling snow, the world retreated.

At last the little trickle of words ran dry. Rei had no idea what a priest might have done next, or a shrine maiden, but in her dream, the standard protocols hardly seemed to matter. There was only one ritual she knew.

“Close your eyes,” she said, the first time she had spoken in this dream. “It’s all right.”

She didn’t know whether the ghost even remembered what that meant, but the cold band loosened around her wrist, and she made a little gesture – a push, a twist, a release – and it was out in the flow of the river, washing away. She hoped the journey would be smooth and swift, all voices muffled in the snow.

***

The next morning, when she drove back over the bridge and out of the town, the music on the radio continued clear and uninterrupted. Rei rolled the window all the way down and drove that way until her fingers were stiff and tingling, until the traces of last night’s snow had melted in the sun.

She stopped at Kei’s as she had promised, this time for a more conventional visit. Rei sipped her tea in the Amakura living-room, and longed for a slice of Miku’s strawberry cake.

“I’m sorry about before,” Kei said, when the pleasantries were over. “I’m sorry for surprising you with the camera and making to take it. I just wanted to get it out of the house as soon as possible, but I shouldn’t have...”

“It's all right. It's fine, actually.”

“I can look again for a buyer. There must be someone, even if it is damaged. You don’t have to keep it as a favour to me, you know.”

“I know,” Rei said. “At first I didn’t want to have it. But I’ve had some time to think, and I’ve decided I’d rather keep it after all.”

Kei’s cup tipped dangerously, but he noticed just in time and put it down on the coffee table. “Why?”

“To remind me of something.”

She could tell he didn’t understand, but that was all right. Kei had been like her, never believing or wanting to believe in things normal people couldn’t see; but he’d found his feet quickly on new terrain, and hadn’t been afraid to acknowledge what he knew to be true. Besides, he had to take care of Mio.

“I never thought it was possible,” she said instead. “The things we saw... I never believed they existed. It’s been two months and I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Has everything changed?”

“No, but you have. We all have.”

“Except for Miku, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? It means we both have help to figure out what it all means.”

It was late when Rei pulled in at home, and Miku was getting dinner ready. She protested a little when Rei gave her an affectionate, one-armed hug – something about flour on her hands and Rei’s dark-coloured blouse – but she was smiling as she went back into the kitchen.

Rei flung herself down on the couch, arms spread wide as if to encompass the whole room. “It’s so good to be home.”

“Did your mother’s birthday party go well?”

“It was fine! I even took some photos, but I don’t think they’re going to come out.”

“Don’t worry until you’ve seen them,” Miku said automatically, and flipped something neatly in the frying pan. “Maybe they’ll be better than you think.”

“You could be right.” Rei stretched, wiggling her toes, and then leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. For what she had to say next, she was a little nervous to risk meeting Miku’s eyes. “Miku?”

“Mm-hm?”

“You said that when you were a child, you could see things, right? Things that other people couldn’t?”

There was a silence. Rei waited tensely. Neither of them had ever spoken about the things Miku had said on that last bad night.

“That’s right,” Miku said at last.

“How did you...” Rei searched for the words. “How did you cope? Not so much with what you could see, but with knowing that no one else could?”

“Well, it wasn’t just me,” Miku said, doing something with the frying pan to make it sizzle. “My brother had the same ability, so I could talk to him. I used to tell him everything. And after I came to live here, Yuu tried to help me, too. It wasn’t the same, because he’d never seen it for himself, but it was still better knowing that someone... believed me.”

Rei remembered the way all the girls had looked at her, hovering somewhere between amusement and concern, wondering what was wrong with her.

The oven door banged shut and Miku came through to the living room, wiping her hands on a towel. “Why do you ask, anyway?”

Rei stared at the ceiling and tried to think how to say it. “Something... happened,” she said finally. 

“Something at your parents’ house?”

“In a way, but really it happened a long time ago. And there are other things, too.” She looked at Miku, who was sitting forward on the couch, waiting anxiously. “So if it’s all right with you... could I tell you some things? Would you mind listening?”

“You can tell me anything.”

It was hard to begin at first, but then Rei thought of the dream she had walked through last night, with her mind perfectly awake. The ghost had spoken until its voice had run out, and at the end there had been the soft wash of the water, bearing it all away. Remembering that, Rei began.


End file.
